At the Colony – Day 21 and 22

Day 21 – For the last twenty days, my routine was as follows: wake up around 11AM, work until 2PM, eat lunch and take a reading break, go back to work from 4PM to dinner time at 6:30, enjoy some wine and good conversations with the other residents, then return to my studio around 9PM, and work until 4AM. Repeat.

This schedule was not going to work in the real world, yet I was enjoying it. It felt natural. Back home, my routine played out like this: wake up at 8:30 AM, head to my day job for seven hours, drive home, cook and eat dinner with my partner, head to the gym (about 3 or 4 times a week), and then write and/or read between 12AM and 2 (or 3AM).

Two or three hours of writing time vs. twelve, ugh. This residency was truly a gift.

Day 22 – For a while, I thought I was working on a three-part novel, a triptych. It was a structure I could easily digest. Now, with all this extra time to sit back and take a close look at the novel, I realized this thing was morphing into something bigger, a tetraptych maybe, who knows? I decided I should stop obsessing about the structure and keep writing. One thing was for sure, the book wanted to be non-linear.